Everyone occasionally hits a road block of one kind or another. It comes with the territory, like that mountain that may be standing in the middle of your path. The one you can’t seem to get around.

Here are three suggestions – not that you didn’t know. It’s just that sometimes we all need to be reminded, especially in today’s over-heated market place:

1. Stop trying to hit a home run. Get a single first. Then before you know it, you’ll be rounding third heading for home.
2. Trust your hunches. They are usually based on a some facts you know, buried back there in your mind, just below your consciousness.
3. Pat yourself on your back. Remember all that you have accomplished in the last year.
4. Don’t try and move the whole mountain. Slice it up in little pieces and move them one at a time.

Every day we are offered choices and make decisions, some larger than others, that will determine our destination. One of the most important is to not give in to the overwhelming cynicism and negativity to which we are all daily subjected.

Another choice – of equal weight – is to decide how we view life. Either we are going to hell in a hand basket, so nothing matters anyway, or it’s a wonderful, once in a life time trip, albeit with some inevitable bumps along the road.

Whichever we decide will influence all our other actions. I, for one, subscribe to the second – the wonderful, once in a life time trip.

It’s not always easy to adopt that view, especially today, but every once in a while something will come along to reinforce that belief.

Like this flash mob at a Madrid employment office a couple of days ago.

It is difficult, if not impossible, not to smile when you watch this… courtesy of npr, there’s no holding back the human spirit.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/201 … ent-office

The only thing we can really know about the future is that it will be different from today and it will arrive whether we want it to or not.

We’re constantly in motion. None of us are who we were when we started out. Events and people change and change us just as we change them.

Loving and losing, suffering losses and celebrating gains, we pass through many lives, putting on and taking off each one like a snake shedding his old skin as we walk through the years, on our way to becoming whom we were meant to be…

It’s that time of year again. Christmas is upon us. For a few days, in many parts of our global village, people will take time out to gather with family and friends, to share a meal, exchange gifts and express greetings of love, joy and hope in the coming year.

However or wherever the greetings and wishes are expressed, or in whatever language, as the old year fades away and a new one beckons, the message is as universal and timeless as the message in this medieval Celtic blessing:

May peace and plenty be the first to lift the latch on your door and happiness be guided to your home by the candle of Christmas.

In the New Year, may your right hand always be stretched out in friendship and never in want.

Merry Christmas. I hope you’ll watch for my next post on Monday, January 7th., 2013.

Honoring the Children

Children are the message we send into the future that we will not see. Neil Postman.

After only a few intense days the international press has already moved on to the next story.

Left behind, amid the wreckage of their lives, out of the spotlight, the parents and siblings of the children murdered in Newtown Conn., together with the families of the six teachers who also died in the massacre will begin the slow process of dealing with the grief of their loss and try to make sense of their loss.

For them, moving on will take a lifetime.

It isn’t only in Newtown, USA. It’s in every town, everywhere around the globe. The violence we adults inflict upon children on many levels, some subtle, others not so much, should make us all feel ashamed and give give us pause…